


Cain

by manthem



Category: Far Cry 3
Genre: Minor Original Character(s), Multi, [Barbara Kruger voice] intricate rituals, a disjointed collection of isolated moments in time for your perusal, postgame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2019-10-13 04:39:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17481350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manthem/pseuds/manthem
Summary: I just come off as a psycho maniac when I'm performin'That's an act so I won't bore you to death, cause I adore you





	1. Cain

**Author's Note:**

> warning for descriptions of gore, slurs, allusions to (no descriptions) of sexual violence, general chaotic horniness but you knew that already. that's why you're here
> 
> summary from the intro to analog 2 by odd future

Jason spends most of his time in their shared room pretending to be asleep lately. He’s trying to avoid looking at Vaas and failing. This morning he lies on his stomach and watches Vaas eat a mango through his eyelashes. The outline of everything is made blurry and unrecognisable unless he stares; Vaas skins and halves the mango with a machete. It’s unwieldy and it would be funny if the blade slipped and he severed his ulnar artery, but he doesn't. He does it perfectly and doesn’t even notice, busy staring at some fixed point on a far wall, silently. Cubes it carefully in his palm, eats the pieces off the blade. Licks them into his mouth with the flat of his tongue, collects the juice running down his wrists the same. He leaves abruptly when he’s done and is gone out the heavy metal doors without prompting.  
Jason rises immediately and walks slowly to the shower, gives a small thanks to an otherwise uncaring God that Vaas’ shower is indoors and adjoining, turns the water as cold as it will go, which isn’t very, but still. Then as hot as it will go, to burn the shame out of his skin, or at least to camouflage it. He steps out of the shower gingerly, mindful of his own self-inflicted tenderness and stands in front of the cracked, spotty mirror to try to recognise himself. In body, change is nominal, and intellectually he is soothed. A tall, fluffy-haired lobster is soothed. 

The only other American in the camp is another woman named Jennifer. She’s new too, only arriving a few days before Jason, but they don’t talk about that much. She doesn’t want to relive it, he doesn’t want to know. So they talk about home instead. It’s painful, clawing open the wound, but they’re both desperate and lonely and Californian, so they clutch at each other and dig their chewed, filthy nails into the shared scab. They compare their places of birth, childhood summers, high school years, whatever. They have just slightly overlapping spheres of friends. She calls boba ‘bubble tea’, her brother plays hockey in Toronto. He wants to know who she was a groupie for back home. She wants to know about childhoods in Malibu. In the twilight her outline blurs and he mistakes her for Liza more than once. 

He sought out women, in the beginning. For once not for slutty reasons, just because he thought they couldn’t drag him into a side room and cut his head off so it might be mounted on the gate. Vaas had said that because of him, women in the camps will not be killed, or be so injured they could die. Jason responded in his head by vowing that because of him, none of the women would be injured at all.  
He has never told any of them this, out of fear they would laugh at him for his arrogance, but they seem to know anyways. He is vindicated at least, that the more time he spends with them, the more his reputation seems to lend itself to theirs, and the skin they are obligated to expose remains unblemished.  
In return for their company, he does the “women’s work” so disgusting or labor intensive that the women themselves are loath to it. He skins whole pigs and hacks them into their component pieces, discards offal, carves away fat, scrapes scrap meat from bones so it can be chummed, and his new sisters murmur thanks.  
Before, a woman called Liwa did this. She left when he took it up, but returned days later. Broad-shouldered with strong hands and thick hair, an old scar takes up more than half her face. As though a bottle were broken on her temple and the jagged edge dragged across her forehead, through her eyeball, over her nose, terminating in her top lip. The topography of her face in the stark relief of the golden hour is ghastly and deeply mesmerising. Her propensity for conversation is small, and Jason doesn’t push it. They work silently and gorily to completion. They drag the carcass to the wooden hut it will be stored or cured or cooked in, depending.  
Before Liwa’s return, caked in blood and flecks of animal corpse, Jason would beg buckets of water to pour over himself, but with her she had brought a hose and now they stand in the blood spattered fields and spray each other down. Jason watches the earth he stands on churn into reeking, putrid mud, watches Liwa sink into the muck when she goes to take his place. They sit on the edge of the field after and smoke.  
Everybody smokes. They inhabit a haze of tobacco and ash and weed. They do not speak, but she sits with him for meals occasionally, as long as Vaas doesn’t. No woman will approach him if Vaas is there. He cannot blame them. He will never ask Liwa about her face and she will never tell him.

The nightmares are omnipresent. Every single night brings a fresh horror, and now it’s so utterly monotonous that he can’t even care that he knows how his intestines would look. This is just another fate he’s inherited from Vaas and it terrifies to imagine what kind of evil could scare him. Jason has spent months now learning the depths the human soul can sink to, but Vaas has had years, or his whole life. Logically, Jason doesn’t know if he is allowed to sympathise with Vaas, after everything, but he can’t really help it anyways. Vaas is vulnerable in the dark and Jason could force himself to abandon him to that, but his last vestiges of compassion are dying in his chest, and he can’t bear to feel them waste to nothing. If in hell he will be made to suffer for this so be it. But like this they can suffer together, and be soothed by it.  
Jason retains his last connections to his humanity, and Vaas has a basin to pour the overflow of his feelings into. And he has so many feelings.  
Jason makes Vaas sleep on his side of the room because it has the real mattress, instead of in the weird nests of blankets and scraps of cloth. If Vaas had his way he would latch onto Jason’s front like a monstrous koala and they would bury themselves in the blankets and never resurface again. The compromise is hanging blankets from the hook the mosquito net is suspended on over the mattress and letting Vaas cling to him like a weird, giant baby; let him brush the soft baby hairs on his neck.  
When Vaas is manic and furious and screaming Jason forces himself to remember these moments, to step forward and take the brunt of his rage. He can bear it and Vaas can’t kill him anyways. Maybe nobody can. So he let’s him yell and rubs his back after anyways, cleans and bandages his hands. When he calms, it’s real calm, instead of just exhaustion, but it makes him weak and clingy and difficult to fear. Jason is pretty sure Vaas is gay but being sad and touch-starved isn’t much better; both make him easy to kill. And if Vaas is easy to kill then he will be, brutally; Jason will follow soon after if he isn’t already dead at that point, and their sisters will follow that. And they will all have lived worthless lives. Every act borne of evil desperation made completely meaningless. Jason prays for his sister’s souls just in case but forgoes his own and Vaas’. It’s too late for them.  
The women have made themselves difficult to kill by being irreplaceable, and by listening. Jennifer shares with him gossip and in turn he relays almost all of it to Vaas. He holds back the murmurs that question Vaas’ right to leadership; his malicious gay faggotry; his indulgences. These Jason uses to inform if and when and how he’ll provoke Vaas into violent hysteria. He is of the opinion that these adult tantrums should make Vaas even more unfit to lead, but they cow his men and bolster his reputation, and so they will continue indefinitely in repulsive secret. He wonders what Vaas would do if he found out. Hopes it would be understood and forgiven, knows most likely that a betrayal to this degree would lead to a rampage. Maybe they would kill each other at last.  
In preemptive apology Jason curls his arms over Vaas’ shoulders and holds him to his chest so Vaas can pillow his head over his heart, let the pulse reassure him of their continued life, and absorbs his nightmares. The imagery is disturbing and the emotions are intense but contextless it’s like watching just the worst clip show in the world and he is relatively unfazed. Vaas says he knows, that he knows everything, that he’s psychic, and that Jason’s “fucking weird” to continue on unbothered. Jason tells him to “eat your fucking rice, nerd”, and Vaas responds by kicking him in the shin. They crack up like children at the lunch table and for three seconds it’s nice to forget that they sit together alone, that their brothers avoid Jason and their sisters avoid Vaas; that together they are known as harbingers of all ruin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello LGBT Community.
> 
> lemme just bump my playlists  
> youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5P_WNsytvDLA62sfIYLtqsBJxrspUDsy  
> youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5P_WNsytvDIXK0bpfQj9s2OnrjWrNd9Z  
> 8tracks.com/starbxte
> 
> thanks


	2. Orion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for implied sexual violence, dermatillomania, unsanitary, mild sexual content, implied mariticide, drug abuse, alcohol use

Seated in the shade of a mangrove, Jason remembers Orion. Companion of Artemis, only man in the party, when the huntresses and his Goddess bathed, what did he do? How did he occupy himself? Jason strings his bow, reads a paperback, daydreams. The women speak softly behind him, occasionally breaking into short bursts of giggling. They avoid English, presumably to gossip (about him) in peace, but the general tone is sedate. To rest is to be vulnerable, to be naked is to be doubly vulnerable, to rest naked is near obscene in it’s disregard for self-preservation. That’s what Jason is for. Back to the water eyes to the trees, be quiet and small and calm. Avoid attention. But a river snake latching onto the femoral artery is still preferable to being naked in the camp showers.  
Liwa had asked him to act as sentinel for them. They had been standing guard for each other, taking shifts. And it had worked, but there was an air of paranoia that couldn’t be assuaged, for they were not permitted to take heavy weaponry. Most of the women did not agree to his presence. They risked slaughter at the hands of privateers trespassing in the north, random unaffiliated marauders, wild animals, the whims of God himself, just to bathe in peace, free of men. Half-sarcastically he offered to blind himself. They responded that he would be of no use to anybody then, and might as well bite the bullet and kill himself, to which he could think of no good retort. Liwa said she would sit between him and the water, to hold a pistol against his spine, lest he turn or rise, and her sisters had accepted those terms. It was the most Jason had ever heard her speak, and he was stupefied. They had dropped this arrangement on the third outing without discussion, and Jason was left to amuse himself alone.  
If Jennifer finishes early she will sit with him and they can talk, but not within his field of vision. If this avoidance arises from an embarrassment at the intimacy of her recent nudity, Jason shares it, if abstractly. In truth, he can only barely conceptualise a naked female body anymore, and when he does, feels no yearning. He feels tired and mournful, mostly, but that is embarrassing too. He doesn’t know who he can ask about the lack of middle ground between his previous and current capacity for lust. Probably a therapist. There aren’t any therapists on the islands. Probably also for the best of the therapist, lest their head explode. Twinning. He thinks about asking Vaas, then worries how pathetic it would make him to beg psychological advice of fucking Vaas. In the end he tells no one; lets it fester in his chest. If it's important he'll see it again.  
On return to camp, he is at last permitted to rest his eyes upon women, continues to feel nothing. Together they listen for the trees, watch their tread, quiet their speech. Jason keeps his weapons on his back or holstered; asleep in his hands they help no one except him and they aren’t even for him. Instead of fiddling with the assorted triggers he’s alternatively acquired Vaas’ tic of messing with the skin of his hands, and pulls his nails off in strips inside his pockets. He draws them out only to suck the dried blood from the cuticle, and returns to picking at the scab. He knows this scares Jennifer, his inherited affinity for self-mutilation. He thinks Vaas might like it, and that’s just weird. He cannot stop either way. 

He spends a lot of his time lost in thought. Most thoughts revolve around himself. That used to be his fatal flaw. He doesn’t really have flaws anymore. Does it count as a flaw if he’s just like this forever, apparently? Is it a flaw if it persists past the destruction of everything else you hold integral? Probably. After himself he thinks of Vaas, but that’s not accurate either. If they are so integral to each other that thinking of himself spawns thoughts of Vaas by necessity, is Vaas really even a subject beside himself? As if in response to this, Vaas flicks him on the forehead. “Stop ignoring RoboCop motherfucker.”  
“I wasn’t”  
“I can read your stupid mind Jason don’t fucking lie to me”  
He’s mad. He’s covering for something. He’s hurt. He pets his shoulder in apology. Gets a gentle pinch on the neck for his trouble.  
“Watching movie”  
Vaas is either psychic or the most perceptive person on the planet. Jason thinks it doesn’t matter which since the end result is the same: unnerving. He’s not sure what he feels towards Vaas as a whole person yet. He’s just getting to know him without pretense, and may be the only person in the world to do so. In making a list of associated emotions he acknowledges camaraderie, annoyance, pity, grief, amusement. Considers lust, finds it wanting, and opts to file it away for later consideration. But even in respect to his bisexuality, with half of his right areola, Citra took his dignity and libido in turn. It’s just as well. He can’t think of a use for any of it. Vaas pulls a hank of his hair like he’s ringing a bell, and Jason remembers to murmur “sorry” and drop his head into Vaas’ lap so he can get his hair played with. In returning his thoughts to the film, he wonders aloud how a cyborg nose works. When Vaas asks him “what the fuck,” he clarifies with “the shit. The fucking corpse shit. You know, when they die and they piss and shit themselves. Do cyborgs puke?” and Vaas laughs at that, musses his hair. “Now who’s the fucking nerd?”

His first sex dream in months is expectedly underwhelming. Getting bunny-fucked facedown on a table in a mall food court while being just kind of ignored by the assorted mall pedestrians. Feels like an allegory for something stupid. He wakes more in shock than actually turned on, feels it fade into annoyance and a dehydration headache. He’s too warm. Apparently he spent the night as the little spoon and Vaas’ chin is digging into the back of his neck and his arms are compressing his ribs. He wants to drag himself into the shower, turn it as cold as possible, and glare accusingly at his hard-on for it’s timing, the fucking traitor. He shifts slowly, not wanting to wake Vaas, trying to peel out of his hold as gently as possible but Vaas just shifts in his sleep. Jason gives up easy, he’s feeling lazy. Feels Vaas mash his face into the meat between his shoulder blades in victory. When they wake in concert an hour or two later, his dick has apparently given up, which is nice. The kind of hell Vaas would give him… terrifying. He stumbles through the morning in a daze, clutching at Vaas’ coattails. He wants to talk to Jen, but she won’t hold his hand under the table. And she might ask how he’s “doing,” and when he has to admit “bad” out loud she would carry that with her. She won’t want to drag his weight. Only Vaas “deserves” to anyway. As long as they live, it will be in tandem, Jason had seen to that as definitively as anyone. Vaas will never ask how he’s doing, what he feels. He already knows, the freak. They are each other’s parallel now, in sickness. Just sickness. The good doctor is dead there’s no health left to anybody. Instead Vaas just brings them both another helping of breakfast because it’s easier to play house than therapist.  
Husband?  
“Are you my wife?” just kind of drools out of his mouth.  
“Yes.” He was waiting for this.  
“Oh.” Together they were waiting for this. It’s good, sharing thoughts. Would be nice if it could go both ways, but at the same time, if Vaas doesn’t want to live in his own head, why would Jason? He has enough of his own evil thoughts. 

One of them lives in the river. Vaas sees her too. She looks like the girl from The Ring, but it would probably be more accurate to say The Grudge. Long hair veils her face, white gown veils her body. Upon first meeting her, his mother had called her “a vision”. Vaas calls her something like “AAAAAAA FUCK”. He’s taken to calling her “Elizabeth”, because it’s her name, and she deserves that dignity at least. He’s robbed her of the rest already. She lives in the river, but is not bound to it, and she’s taken to following him. He’s not sure if she’s dangerous or if he should be afraid. He is afraid anyways, because Vaas is afraid. She climbs on his back. They do not speak to each other. He doesn’t want to know what she might say. When she is without him he has seen her perch atop Jennifer, pulled around her like an exoskeleton, superimposed. He doesn’t like this metaphor and moves to avoid them both. She is more striking in his sobriety, and he gives thanks for that. When it becomes too much it is easier to rebuke his sobriety. To reject her would mean to acknowledge her truly and then he really might lose whatever’s left of his mind. And he’s using that. Kind of.  
Considers a coke relapse. Considers a smack relapse. Gets wine drunk instead, wipes out half of Vaas’ stash, has Vaas yell at him. So maybe he destroyed the primary mode of communication with the mainland, cutting off all external supply lines, but it’s just wine, right? And then he starts crying. Because he’s drunk. On the wine. Fucking bullshit. Vaas pets his hair extremely tentatively, tries desperately to imbue little murmurs with comfort, but only a third of them are even in English. It’s okay though. It’s working.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> through gritted teeth, clenched as though in pain, a guttural noise winds through the air; "just guys being dudes"
> 
> my ultimate goal to make you all eat a thesaurus is finally revealed


	3. Samson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i would describe this particular chapter as 'abominable'
> 
> warning for: attempted animal harm, drowning (this is a big one), gore, panic attacks (another big one), self harm 
> 
> also graphic depictions of tender sensuality if it makes you feel any better

There is a cat. There are not a lot of house(? did she come from a house?) cats on the islands. As far as Jason knows, she is alone, but he isn’t exactly hunting cats. Vaas wants to catch her. He’s banned anybody except him from going near it. Apparently some of his men wanted to catch her for the sport of it all. Vaas wants to keep her. He wants a pet or something. So now he’s crouching in a bush with a bunch of raw meat trying his damnedest to entice her. She’s about three feet away. They’re playing some kind of game of chicken where she’ll come right up to sniff at his hand, he’ll reach out to pet her, she’ll jolt away. They’re on hour 2. Jason has been watching this the whole time. He’s not sure if this is what it means to be “entranced” but he’s still here, halfway up a tree, a good distance away, spying. He was going to film it but after thirty minutes gave up. There’s a betting pool Vaas doesn’t know about. The people who think he’ll catch her, the people who think he won’t, and the people who think that he’ll get so frustrated by dealing with her that he’ll lose his shit and try to shoot her. Jason volunteered to act as third-party spectator so he wouldn’t have to take a bet himself. The cat is back to sniffing suspiciously around Vaas, who every time she rejects him, gets just a touch closer to the edge. Jason really wants him to catch her. She’s really cute. Vaas is trying a new strategy. Instead of reaching out to pet her, which just freaks her out, he’s just holding his arm out, with little bits of meat on it. She’s the closest she’s ever been. He lowers his arm very slowly alongside her. She tenses but does not run, and begins to pick the meat off his arm and eat it at his feet. He reaches out as slowly as he can and lays his hand on her back and she lets him pet her, finally. Jason raises his camera to take a picture of Vaas’ smile, before dropping out of the tree to sprint back to camp before him.  
Jason's rushed announcement to the camp was met primarily by groans and whining. Apparently the people were pessimistic. The men at the gates holler. Vaas is back. Jason had thought he would announce his victory before not only the eyes of God but his people, at the top of his lungs; apparently he is restraining himself for the cats sake. She’s riding on his shoulder. The sunlight dapples her short, mottled coat. Vaas strides into the canteen grinning and demands fish. He places her on the table and she immediately jumps to the ground and runs away. Jason steps out from around the side of the building and catches her. She claws at him but he holds her to his chest until she stills, and pets her until she calms. He carries her back to Vaas who plies her with fish and fawns over her for a while. She’s a little fat. The carrion peppered across the island has been good to her. He sits with Vaas and plays with the cat, Vaas tells him to call her ‘Mija’, people trickle by to pet her. They are a family, for a moment. 

Jason spends more and more time deep in the trees. His chest is healed, been healed, and he’s been bored, so bored. All he sees is grey all he hears are people all he smells is burning meat and burning plants and sweat. And Vaas. Always Vaas. It’s good to be alone in the wood. He takes no guns, he did not plan for war, and would be barred by his brothers from starting another. His bow is good enough. His knives are good enough. He carries an old clamshell and a water flask in a belt along his chest. He moves light, stalks across the ground. He’s practising tracking by following a dog. He’s trying to scent it, feel out it’s tracks, the fur it sheds. He’s getting closer to it, he thinks. He feels light, free. Passing through a meadow along a stream, he pauses in a sunbeam to revel in the joy of being alone in a progeny of Eden. Filling his lungs with the musk of damp earth, animal leavings, rotting fruit, fresh flowers, clear water. If the dog has somewhere to be, it can be found again. He kneels at the base of a tree and clasps his hands, mimicking his parents form, as always. Upon leaving home, he had not often prayed, but Citra had awoken his capacity for all-consuming devotion, the intensity of which has outlasted her. He gives a quiet thanks to the piety she inspires; it is perhaps her best quality. He murmurs his small asks, small thanks, and just stills before ending it, listening to the water burble and birds talk. Sinks into a meditative quiet, feels his cells divide. God speaks to him through the wind, so he rises quietly, crosses the stream. The dog is forfeit. He follows a wraith to a cenote and climbs down after her. She sinks beneath the water. So does he. Her hair and gown float out to wreath her as she falls gently to the bottom. He lets the jungle out of his lungs and the dark tug at his ankles, chases her back down into the cool embrace of the mud. The void encircles his vision and the last thing he sees is her face. Little ironies.  
He comes to with a headache near the ocean. His flesh is sore and waterlogged. His eyes are heavy. His limbs are heavy. He turns his head to expel the contents of his stomach, crawls further onto the grass away from his sick, lays his head in the Earth’s lap and drops back off into black. 

Jason shifts his car into park, turns off the engine. Reaching over across the console to the bags of groceries on the floor. Grabs a raspberry out of the little paper carton and pops it in his mouth, tries to savour it, an indulgence. Opens his door, lifts the bags into his lap, and stands. It’s the minutes leading up to sundown and the front of the house has gone from orange to a burnished amber. There’s music playing, something with a soft guitar, a man singing in Spanish, occasionally a crackle. She’s playing a record. He knocks on the door with his forehead and when she tips their heads through the curtain to see who it is he winks. She sways slightly as she leans back in and when the door opens he can see that she’s weaving gently, Mentari held close to her breast. He nudges the door closed with his heel and toes his sneakers off, presses a kiss to both their foreheads. She begins to sing along as all three of them wander into the kitchen, and she picks through the bags one-handed, plucks a golden plum out, places the whole thing in her mouth. Ari grabs after her so she takes another plum out and holds it before her, lets the baby play with it, try to crush it in her baby fist. Jason closes the pantry door on the emptied bags, lifts his daughter out of her arms so Citra can eat. He can’t sing along but he can sway as well as anyone, and she can’t tell the difference anyways. He wonders if his father felt this awed, or this terrified, holding his firstborn. There is the sound of a plums rending flesh behind him as Citra rests her head on his back and they all stand unmoving for a minute. As she steps around him she presses a kiss to his shoulder. Melts into the couch, relishes the fruit in her mouth. He places their daughter in a bassinet next to her and returns to the kitchen to reheat the pasta his mother gave them for dinner, thinks about blending something for Ari. She hasn’t eaten real baby food yet, just milk. He’ll do it tomorrow. He’ll do it with Citra. He carries out their food, cranberry juice for her, lemonade for him, sits on the floor so he can eat off the coffee table. They eat without talking, and even Mentari doesn’t gurgle; she inherited her mother's affinity to the spirit, and she knows her mother is tired. When the plates are clean Ari has fallen asleep so Jason lifts her bassinet to rest on the table, and takes her place on the couch. Citra curls into his side, rests her full weight on his body, and he loops his arms around her shoulders. The peace is languorous. She kisses at his neck soft as anything. Climbing into his lap she presses their cheeks together, drops her head onto the junction of his throat. He lifts his hands up under her (his) shirt and around her waist. She’s heavier now, fullest in the hips and legs as he’s ever known her, runs his knuckles up and down the knobs of her spine. Below her collarbones there’s nothing sharp left. He holds her close to his heart, pillowed across his chest. Her hair smells of lavender and hemp and he buries his face in the cloud, mumbles to her temple “I love you. So much”  
“I know, mi amor, my Jason. Te quiero” and he thinks he would ask to marry her again if he could. She brings her legs up and he rises slowly to give her time to wrap them around his waist before resettling. He brushes his nose against the top of her cheek and she kisses the underside of his jaw, then his cheek, and rests her mouth at the corner of his lips. He flicks his tongue against the top of her lip and she opens her mouth slightly to let him lick the front of her teeth, before kissing him properly. He mutters “I love you” into her mouth and she swallows around it; it slides down her throat to rest in her core. He drops his left arm to run his hand along the top of her thigh, up to her hip, and back down again, over and over. From her place on the table Mentari begins to fuss and he comes to himself dizzy, as though recently drowned. Citra looks embarrassed, but happy and she presses their foreheads together before sliding off his lap so she can lift Ari out of her blankets to feed her. Jason is passed his daughter, and begins to play with the little curls along her forehead, while Citra lifts her shirt over her head. She takes their baby and holds her to her breast while Jason drapes a soft throw over her shoulders like a tent, to shield them from the world. The moment is warm. The world is ethereal and beautiful. He feels unreal. In the fading light, they blur together; one body. 

Jason awakens in the mud. His flesh itches, marked as it is with fresh and old bug bites. A mosquito lands on the back of his hand and he watches it crawl over to a protruding vein before smacking it so hard his arm tingles all the way to the elbow. There is a smear of blood amongst the green gore of it’s ruined body. When he attempts to push himself up his arm gives out and he falls back to the dirt. Upon relief from the earth he had noticed a slight pull at his face, and upon resting his cheek back against the grass, realises that the grass had stuck to his face and left small indentations, which have now begun to itch in earnest. He rolls over onto his side and attempts to claw himself into at least sitting, so he might lean his weight on a tree. In the burgeoning dusk the landscape is ephemeral and Jason feels half-alive. He raises the sensitive skin of his inner left arm to his mouth, presses it to his lips, bites softly, laves over the fading teeth marks with his tongue. It is immeasurably worse than the love pouring from her touch and for a minute he feels such a wave of frustration and shame that he cannot see, nor think, and clutches at the roots he rests between in a fervid desperation not to throw himself onto his own blades. His hands twitch from the pressure and he imagines the satisfaction in scoring his flesh, the proof of his struggle, the tenderness of it’s healing, the expressiveness. He breathes carefully in through his nose and back out through his mouth to curb the rising nausea. A strange noise fills his skull, emanating from the inside of his ears, like a buzz. It fills his skull. His breathing skips and his vision blacks for a second and he takes quickened breaths so as not to be without air for even a second. Focusing his eyes as resolutely as he can on the trees on the far bank of the river, he loses sight of the world encircling it. The world moves in and out of focus and he loses points of orientation to shifting blankness. He sits there, consciousness split between breathing and begging for an end. He can feel his heartbeat in the centre of his forehead and it compounds the nausea until he feels he might die if he doesn’t expel something, but the prospect of moving at all, even to avoid his own sick, seems impossible. He will suffer interminably.  
He thinks of Vaas, and Jennifer. Liwa. Bavneet who scales fish, and stabbed her own palm. Diah, who sprinted over at the screams, and slapped her across the face to still her; who had instructed him how to clean and bandage the wound, before fainting at the sight of blood. Mijita. Elizabeth, finally. Grant. A knife twists.  
His sight fades entirely, and returns. The world returns to a recognisable form which eases the contraction of his heart. He evens his breath. Takes deep, long pulls of air, holds them in his lungs, blows his pain out of his chest. On shakiest legs and arm, turns to his side; pukes. Crawls to the river, kneels in the mud, drops his arms into the freezing wet up to the elbow, submerges his entire face. Holds himself like that until he thinks he might die, sits back. Cupped handfuls of water rinse out his mouth, and he spits his sins back into the sea. He thinks of his daughter. Mentari.  
Hunched over his body, on his knees, Jason can behold his reflected visage on the water. He looks like shit. Fitting. He watches liquid drip from his eyes, run down his cheeks, get caught in the stubble at his jaw, collect with the water there, drop off his chin. He closes his eyes in rejection. Crushing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes, he can feel them compressing his eyeballs into the skull, and wonders if they would pop. In preparation for an oncoming scream, he opens his jaw as wide as it will go and feels something in his ear pop instead. The howl released is louder and longer than he would have thought and is not unlike that of a lost beast. Somewhere beyond the trees, a single dog cries a response. 

Dawn is revelatory, such is its nature. In the cold light Jason feels unforgiven and forsaken. He crawls miserably back to camp, arrives unbidden while the morning is still grey. Passes through the expiring night guard, begs cold leftovers of his sisters, and eats them in a hastened daze. He wants to see Vaas. Slinking through the camp quietly, ducks around corners and into their rooms. He finds Vaas way in the back, away from where either of them sleep, wrapped in blankets. Mijita lies curled against his stomach and lifts her little head to blink at Jason. There’s no room for him and he can feel his heart climb up his oesophagus. The cat is in his way and he reaches for her on autopilot. He closes his hand around her and she thrashes, gouges deep into his wrist, kicks Vaas full in the face; he yells and bolts upright. Mija yowls and twists free, sprinting for the open door and out into the camp and Vaas cries a wordless anguish after her. Blearily, he staggers upright, but his foot is stuck in the fabric and he trips, falling into Jason heavily. They are knocked to the floor, both too exhausted to move, but Vaas tries anyways. Struggling to move his sleep-wracked body, accomplishing little more than bruising his knees and Jason's stomach. “Why did you do that? Why did you fucking do that? WHY DID YOU FUCKING DO THAT?” Vaas wails.  
“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry please forgive me please please please please please” is all Jason can get out in response before his composure gives way completely. Vaas comes up on his knees and pins his arms. Jason doesn’t fight it. He can’t hear. He can’t see. Vaas is shaking him. Spit or tears is landing on his cheeks. He thinks of his daughter. Liza’s face swims before the blank of his inner eyelids. Screams. Stills. Void.  
Vaas is wiping his face off with something rough, trying to drag him upright. He goes as easy as he can without opening his eyes; is led to the bathroom; is set on the floor. A washcloth is dampened with warm water and dabbed at his face. He places his hands on Vaas’ shoulders and tries to continue choking out apologies but he still can’t hear. A hand rubs the back of his neck and combs his hair, gentle. Jason realises Vaas is trying to soothe him again. He can’t tell if it’s working but his hearing is coming back, and he opens his eyes slowly. Vaas brings his hands up, either side of his face, thumbs pressing into the ridge of his cheekbones. His hands are strong, fingers calloused and scarred, but his touch is light. Jason loops his own hands around Vaas’ forearms, tries to push his hands in harder. Vaas obliges, draws just short of crushing Jason’s skull like a vice. It’s grounding and distracting in turn and he feels his thoughts circle around them, but languidly now. Vaas releases him slowly and Jason pushes their faces together so their foreheads meet. It is foul to breathe another’s breath, fouler still to breathe in the stale morning expression. Worth it. Vaas pushes back against him until his head hits the back wall, drops a hand so it rests against his adam’s apple, presses lightly. Not quite choking, but pressure. Jason releases his grips, runs his hands along Vaas’ arms, up his shoulders, until they reach his carotid arteries. He closes his grip around Vaas’ neck, brushing his thumbs back and forth across the smooth front of Vaas’ throat. Vaas doesn’t quite kiss him, he more presses his whole face into the side of Jason’s, and anything to do with lips is incidental. Jason still flinches back hard enough to crack his skull against the wall. Vaas jolts and drops his hands, which makes it worse. They say “sorry” at the same time, almost into each others mouths.  
Looking into Vaas’ eyes is hard, they’re like shards of coloured glass, and comparably sharp and solid. Jason tries anyways and they just stare at each other for a while, his hands still around Vaas’ neck. He sniffs “I need a shower”  
“Okay,” flat. He doesn’t move. Jason can’t think of how to respond. He stands awkwardly, his legs are weak and his body is untrustworthy; all his weight goes into the wall. “You have to get your cat right? You have to find her” Vaas comes up after him, steadier but still off-balance “you wanna say something, fucking say it”  
Jason can’t look at him now, points his face at the ceiling. “Why, if you can read my stupid mind?”  
“You want me to leave”  
“You don’t want to leave?”  
“No,” flat again. “You’re going to do something to yourself if I leave”  
“I hurt Mija that should be good for you,” comes out in a huff. Jason feels like a petulant child. In that moment he hates himself. Vaas’ hands very gently encircle his wrists. He presses a soft kiss to the underside of his left first, and then the right. Then the tops of Jason's hands; left, then right.  
“You have to make it up to us. You know that? You better fucking make it up to us,” is murmured in the softest voice Jason’s ever heard him use.  
“Okay,” is mumbled so quietly Jason isn’t sure if it actually made it all the way out his mouth. But Vaas nods. Bumps their foreheads together as a goodbye and loosens his grip, turns and leaves wordlessly. Jason stands alone in the bathroom. For the benefit of human searchers, Vaas screams “MIJITA! DÓNDE ESTÁS?!” and is met by beleagured moaning.  
Numbly, Jason tries to undo his shoes, belts, fastenings. Dumps his gear in a pile behind the door, clothes across from it. He looks at himself naked in the mirror. He doesn’t recognise his body, mutilated and filthy. The shower will only be warm for fifteen minutes maximum, so he tries to work fast despite his weakness, but he’s still shivering when he climbs out. Scrubs himself raw with the scratchy towels. Fumbles his way into clean shorts and one of Vaas’ shirts, and finally the tent around his mattress. He wants to pile blankets on top of himself, and dig his arms into something. He needs weight. He snatches the tent off it’s hook and settles the whole thing over his body. He’s shaking almost too hard to move his hands accurately. He presses his nails into his arms, and drags. The scratches itch, and he scratches those. Pink on red on tan. He wants Vaas. Worries the raw meat of his forearms, gnaws at the tender flesh of his hands, bites clean through his bottom lip. If his body contains such metallics, why is it not similarly durable? To be sculpted of steel, heartless and immortal, would be a relief. “The Tin Man was a stupid bitch” is his last thought before the lights go out. 

He dreams of the Terminator.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not to out myself as les Bien Canadienne Putain de Couleur but Women Are Good, Actually. 
> 
> shout out to anybody who caught that pun i am very funny ;0
> 
> edit (2/16/19): chapter 4 has been taken down By Me ao3 user manthem for being subpar. it'll be back eventually, but good this time.


	4. Paris

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> animal death, alcohol use, drug use, desperate yearning, incredible tenderness

He seeks his sisters only to find that Liwa shaved her head. Without her hair cloaking it, the scars on her face are even starker in comparison with bare flesh. It is a monstrous expression and she seems to revel in it, utterly rejecting even the pretence of affability now. She wears men’s clothing often, all scavenged either from trash or corpses, and has taken to carrying a pistol in her belt. She can shoot, but not well. Jason had challenged her to a show of marksmanship at the river, and while not so wide they missed entirely, did not hit as accurately as they could. The kickback throws her arm out and she knows this; works her arms hard, to trembling. When he has time Jason tries to rub the sore muscle like he’d seen boxers do, brings her ice when she rejects touch. He feels a strange pride watching the sharpness that grew within her chest, burst outwards and be known as spines. It feels good to watch his sisters make themselves difficult to kill. He is aware that this is probably compensation for past failures. He stashes any and all derringers he finds and passes them on anyways.   
Jennifer is loath to learn to shoot but cannot explain where or how else she would learn than from him. Perhaps she does not intend to at all. He gives her a small one-handed hatchet she can hang from her belt and has her throw it at trees until she can hit it at chest height, sinking the blade in at least three-quarters of the way.   
Daisy had told him once when he was seventeen that women find violence as entertaining as any man, and he had disbelieved her judgement, as at the time he did not believe she had known an intimate womanhood long enough. He had never asked any lovers. Standing at the edge of the jeering as Jennifer swings the hatchet to decapitate a pig carcass, he regrets his dismissal. His time around stoic butchers had left him unprepared for the feminine brand of vicious, bloodthirsty zeal. He thinks that perhaps he should address this particular blind spot before it stabs him in the thorax again. Possibly with a hatchet. Caked in flecks of meat and congealed blood Jennifer looks unlike anything he has ever wanted to see again, and he is forced to recuse himself, lest he run screaming. 

He thinks he sees Elizabeth smile.

The kitchen is an open building, with only a back wall cordoning off the pantry and the store room for meat. When a big meal is cooking the whole camp can smell it. Like moths around a candle flame, people circle the kitchen, wafting through to ask for early handouts, nonsense favours, offers of small labours. A man named Tama drags a kiddie pool-sized square bucket of crabs through the centre of camp and Jason drops from the raised floor to the dirt to meet him, and together they haul it up. Tama offers to help them kill and dismember the crabs but he is waved off. Before leaving he gives Jason a small glare Jason returns by sticking his tongue out. Jason drives a long, thin knife through the crabs brains, throws the carcass into another bucket so it can be fished out and washed. A group of wok’s each the size of a child’s coffin heat over the fire pit. Crushed garlic and ginger, some kind of citrus, other green herbs and little anchovy-like fish, are frying in oil. Jennifer, spattered in potato starch mixes a goop that's supposed to become noodles, but instead gifts her with the visage of the woman who killed the stay puft marshmallow man and coated herself in his ectoplasm as a warning to future victims.   
While waiting for her turn at the fire she paints kitty whiskers on her cheeks. Jason lets her dot a smiley face on him.   
The crabs are thrown into the oil at last and the smell is incredible. Vaas blows in finally and helps them carry the hot pans off the fire, and replace them with the water for the noodles. He smashes ginger with the heel of his palms while Diah mashes garlic into a paste with a fork, which they add to the water with what seems like an insane amount of salt. The gloop is poured through a dried gourd shell with little holes drilled in it and when mixed with the hot broth, finally congeals into what could be called noodles. Liwa comes through with bare feet and damp cut-off jeans, a pallet of sliced pork in her arms. They collect the noodles with long chopsticks and pull them out of the water, hang them on little racks to dry. When the drops of goo that didn’t form into proper strands are fished out, the pork goes in and is passed through the hot water to cook it, and tossed into a wok to brown. People begin to filter through, cracking open the crabs, mixing the soft flesh and oil with the noodles, collecting bowls of rice with steamed greens and pork. Jason sits on a table in the corner next to Vaas sharing a random bowl too small to cook or serve in, but too large for one person to eat from. Vaas pulls a little metal tin of hand rolled cigarettes from a pocket somewhere and they pass one back and forth between mouthfuls of carbohydrates and hibiscus tea. For the first time in a long time Vaas gives them the okay to pull out the coffee, and Jason remembers to ask “what’s the occasion?” Vaas is quiet for a while after that, like he didn’t hear or something and Jason’s about to ask again when he says quietly “it’s my birthday.”  
“Oh. Oh!”  
“Mmhmm.” He’s smiling now, a little. Jason bumps him with his elbow “I didn’t get you anything”  
“That was the idea”  
“Still. How old are you?”  
He’s smiling with his teeth now “wouldn’t you like to know”  
“Dick”  
“Do something ‘bout it” so Jason steals the entire bowl of food to his side and Vaas screeches like a struck bird and grabs at his arms while they laugh. Later, they drink coffee while doing clean up and throw soap at each other, missing by huge margins. Jason tries to convince Liwa to build a suds mohawk on her head but she denies him this satisfaction. Vaas makes piles of rejected flesh for his cat. People begin to gather around the bonfire in the centre of camp, playing music. Jennifer dances. Jason had never gotten around to learning what she’d done back home for money. She’s pretty good, limbs stronger than they appear, can hook a leg around the pole, hold her weight up for longer than he would have thought and spin, hair fanning out around her. She’s making decent money, the people are in good spirits. When she swans by where Jason’s been watching she leans in, lets him tuck a handful of bills into the tie in her hair. At the end she can fill two baskets to full, and Vaas has a death grip on the back of his shirt. “Don’t flirt at my fucking party”  
“Do something ‘bout it” Jason responds before getting up to sit with Jen. She’s folding the bills into origami birds when he finds her and she shrugs apologetically, smiles. “What else am I going to do with it?”   
“Fold it into butterflies”  
When Vaas hunts them down while cracking his knuckles Jason goads him into making tulips. 

(“Of course I can fucking make fucking tulips you motherfucker. Son of a bitch idiot. Fuck you. I can make the best fucking tulips you’ve ever seen in your worthless fucking life, cocksucker”

The whisky burns Vaas’ bitterness, Jason’s temper, and Jennifer’s inhibitions off. Jennifer holds the spool of twine they dig out of a back closet, Jason unwinds it neatly, Vaas cuts it. Jason carries her on his shoulders to hang the birds and the butterflies from the rafters of the canteen; Vaas strings his blossoms through and fashions them into garlands. Jason asks if she “needs two fine gentlemen to accompany her to her apartments on this balmy eve’n” and Vaas calls him a clown, but loops his arm through her elbow to walk her back anyways. Jennifer begins to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ and they caterwaul in a line. 

Liwa sits at the door to the women’s building, smoking a pungent cigar in a rickety wooden chair, gat on her knee. They leave a giggling Jen with her, take each others hands without talking, swing them back and forth wildly like hyperactive children. In Vaas’ rooms they’re too wired to sleep and too sedated to move so they lie tangled amidst each other listening to the sounds of the party muffled through the metal doors. Jason mumbles “happy birthday, baby” into Vaas’ neck.  
“I don’t think ‘s even m’birthday anymore…”  
“Don’ matter…”  
“...Imma adult man, too… not baby…” and Jason snuffles soft laughter into his carotid artery.  
“Don’t snort on me… you animal… fuckman… bastard,” so Jason drags his tongue along the top of his shoulder and Vaas screams like a dying cat, tries to fling him off. Jason digs his hooks in until Vaas shoulders him in the throat and they’re flipped. The air leaves his body and with it his ability to draw in more. Literally wheezing with laughter and astral projecting a little bit he feels Vaas lick his adam’s apple and scream at his eyes “HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? FUCKER”  
Between desperate heaving he croaks out “do it (gasp) again (gasp) so I can (gasp) be sure,” and Vaas gets very quiet. Very still and very quiet. Jason starts coughing like a cat hacks up a hairball, draws in breath like a slashed car tire in reverse. He can’t look at Vaas’ eyes. Vaas drops his weight fully onto Jason’s lap and tangles a hand into his hair, pulls back slowly, with no give. Jason meets his eyes, holds his gaze; Vaas drops his face to the front of Jason’s shaking throat, opens his jaw, presses a ring of teeth and lips to his oesophagus. Between the shock, Vaas crushing his body, and having his back slammed into the mat; Jason can’t breathe. He rolls them again onto their sides and Vaas detaches to bring his head up, press their foreheads together.   
“Hey”  
“Hey. Baby”  
“Asshole”  
Jason smiles weakly, “do something ‘bout it,” and closes his eyes. 

So Vaas presses their mouths together very softly. Jason’s shaking so hard that Vaas has pull him tight to his chest. Jason fists his arms in the front of his shirt and kisses him roughly, mashing the lower half of their faces together so hard his teeth click together, and he bites the inside of his own lip with enough force to draw blood. Vaas pokes his tongue at the break in Jason’s mouth; licks the blood off his teeth. Floating outside of his shattered little brain, Jason wonders if he tastes good. He nips at Vaas’ tongue and moves to change the angle. They widen their open jaws; tracing the ridges of teeth; mapping the soft palate. When Vaas pulls hard on Jason’s hair again, he groans deep in his chest without thinking. On auto-pilot Jason’s hands come up to wrap around Vaas’ throat and squeeze softly; Vaas gasps into his mouth and they try to bite each other at the same time. Shattered and dizzy, they break for air. Eyes closed, Jason traces scars, veins, sinew, bones along Vaas’ arms. He doesn’t know when he passes out of this meat into unconsciousness. He dreams of running through a never-ending jungle without tiring, in pursuit of a lion with a fiery mane. Upon catching it, the flames burn him to immobility and the lion feasts upon his charred corpse. 

He comes to with his face pressed so hard against Vaas’ shoulder that when he edges away, he realises that his nose is almost completely numb. Vaas is dead to the world and then some. Body exactly the temperature of the air, breathing shallow and slow, only moving with a nightmare, he really is something half-dead. Jason tries to hold back from poking him in the face just to check that he’s still there. He had done that once, the very first time, under suspicion that Vaas was fucking dead, finally. And upon sudden awakening, Vaas had instinctually punched him in the face.   
Hurt like the dickens.   
He thinks about kissing Vaas awake, for a nice change of pace. Or at least flipping them over so Vaas’ weight might crush him into the mattress. Jason’s too wired to fall back asleep now, but he doesn’t want to wake Vaas up and take precious rest from him. Except that he does, anyways, so he can choke to death on Vaas’ uvula. Or whatever. Because he wants to, more than anything, for the first time in ages. He wants Vaas to wake up and hold him, and maybe keep holding him, until the sun turns into a black hole and they are obliterated, and their atoms can be blended together into a flesh smoothie. He’d seen that done, once. Vaas had found a blender, almost in pieces from “surviving” a shipwreck, and jammed a privateers arm into it. Jason didn’t remember what happened to that privateer, just the spattering of leaf-dappled sunlight on Vaas’ shoulders. He wonders why Vaas lives in such an ugly compound, carved of the Earth itself that he is. Bones sculpted from the branches of great trees upon which clay was molded into flesh, what use does he have for concrete.   
Vaas mumbles through a sleep-clotted mouth “shut the fuck uuuuuuuupp… think too loud…” and Jason kisses him once in the centre of his forehead. Vaas hums and is gone again, so Jason gets up in search of food and aspirin.   
Liwa and Bavneet are alone in the kitchen, Liwa sweeping the floors and Bavneet cubing mangoes. Jason finds leftover noodles crammed into the back of a cooler and eats them, shards of frost and all. Bavneet takes his bowl and comes back with fruit and a beer, so he brings them over to where she’s sitting and starts smashing coconuts in half as neatly as possible with the sharp end of a hammer. He wishes Vaas were here. He would know a better way. Bavneet probably also knows a better way considering her smirk and lack of eye-contact, but he won’t deprive her this amusement. She takes a coconut half and downs the milk like a shot without choking on shell shards so he assumes it’s safe to continue.   
Following an unknowable cue, Liwa finishes her sweeping and leaves for the women’s building without speaking to either of them. Bavneet doesn’t even look up so Jason tries to ignore it. She returns with a herd of groaning women, including Jennifer, who immediately staggers to the fruit bowl and starts eating pineapple chunks with her hands. Bavneet begins passing out coconut halves to be used as bowls, and Jason moves to sit on a bench instead of the floor. Jennifer has no such inclinations and sits next to his right foot so that she might rest her head on his knee, and Jason has to think very quickly and very hard if he should push her away, and for whose sake. He watches her smash the heel of her hand into her nose in lieu of scratching it and decides to extend small mercies. He pats her head very tentatively and she says something like “hyeurgh…” and sneezes twice.  
“Are we going to the river later?” Jason asks Liwa.  
“Probably,” she replies before yawning wide. Jason mimics her.  
He leaves with fruit and Jenny’s head resting against Liwa’s thigh. The walk back to Vaas is beautiful, soft morning sun filtering through wispy clouds and no people.   
Jason opens the door on a near-cave, dark as it is. Vaas is curled over himself under heavy cloth with the cat sitting on top of it all. She watches Jason approach and when he kneels next to her she bolts abruptly. Jason supposes he deserves that. He rubs his hand against Vaas’ shoulder to wake him and hears a mumbled curse in response. Carefully not to shake him, he pulls the blanket off. Vaas is scowling and his eyes are shut too tight for actual rest. Jason watches him for a second, noticing a sun spot high on his cheek, before laying his hand on Vaas’ scalp. Tracing the scar with the pads of his fingers, petting along his scalp. Vaas’ face relaxes slowly and he murmurs something too soft to make out. Jason lays his forehead against Vaas’ temple to press a kiss to the top of his ear, body curled over him. Jason peppers kisses over the side of Vaas’ face, along his brow and temples and down to the corner of his mouth, which twitches slightly as Vaas fights a smile. “Waaaake uuuuup” Jason croons.   
“Mmmmmm…”  
“Baaaby... C’mooon…”   
“mmMMM…”  
Jason drops his face to kiss the side of Vaas’ nose but Vaas turns his head into Jason’s to kiss him for real. His mouth tastes like morning breath and Jason sucks gently on the tip of his tongue anyways. When Jason pulls away slowly Vaas whines, but his eyes are open and he follows Jason’s mouth up. They’re soft, muzzy and vulnerable, and Vaas tugs Jason’s left hand to his chest before he can begin to pick through the fruit. Freeing himself, Jason moves to roll a hangover cure each; Vaas put him back onto herbs in the blend, and he adds powdered hibiscus for the smell, palani for the hell of it. Vaas hands him a matchbook from out of one of the endless pockets of his pants. Sitting together, wreathed in a pale yellow smoke, smelling of the earth and her blossoms, they link their hands together, fingers entwined. Vaas lays his head on Jason’s shoulder so Jason rests his cheek on his scalp and asks “do you wanna go upstairs?”  
“What upstairs?”  
“Roof”  
“...Yeah okay”

There’s already a mattress on the roof, wrapped in a tarp. Vaas brings huge fabric sheets, Jason brings the stakes and they make a massive, billowing nest. Mid-morning sunlight filters through the drapes and the shadows layer into blues and reds. Tucked within it all, the light is a deep, beautiful purple. Vaas tempts the kitty to come up with them and she lies on his chest, while he lies in Jason’s lap, and Jason ruins his hair even further than sleep could. The camp comes alive beyond the low wall bordering the roof. Low tones, low volume, but somebody is singing softly. Jason doesn’t recognise her voice, and she’s singing in “Tagalog or some fucking shit I don’t know, man” according to Vaas. Jason wonders aloud which of the sisters is Filipina, Vaas questions if it even matters.  
“Maybe I want to know who’s singing”  
“Why?” and Jason can’t think of a better answer than “curiosity, I guess”  
“Oh yeah, very clear, very specific, good fucking job”  
Jason flicks him on the forehead and when Vaas squawks his protest, leans down to kiss the mark. Mija kicks in her dreamings and Vaas murmurs “she gets it from me…” so Jason laughs and tucks his hand around the far side of Vaas’ jaw, thumb rubbing along his beard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Ayesha Erotica Voice] I do it for the Girls and the Gays, that's it
> 
> very odd going from a weekly update schedule to this. oops! 
> 
> i already linked this in the notes of chapter 1 but take [this playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5P_WNsytvDLA62sfIYLtqsBJxrspUDsy) i made specifically for writing shit with this energy


	5. Adonis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings: gore, suicide, animal death, heavy unreality
> 
> i flipflopped on if i would post this because of how divorced it is from the rest of the chapters and then i remembered these are supposed to be mostly divorced, semi-isolated, moments in time as they happen to catch my fancy so! have some crazy weird shit i guess

Short, light taps against the wood of the door. Nervous of awakening the rest of the inhabitants of the house, the man behind the door, and the man requesting passage through, muffle their tones.

“Come in”

The knob turns, creaks, the door is opened. The young man standing in the threshold is late-teens, tall, skinny, except for his shoulders. He’s wearing a thin leather jacket, dark jeans, red sneakers. He is visibly anxious and reluctant to speak first. His name is Jason. 

“What do you want, J?” the man in the room asks, “and close the door behind you.” He is older, early-twenties, sitting in a computer chair before a macbook; shoeless, in sweatpants and a loose t-shirt, he seems to be on the verge of bed. His name is Grant.

“I uh… I did… something. To the car not a person. Um” 

“What did you do to the car”

“I dented it,” Jason admits, and holds up his thumb and forefinger, close but not touching, “like this much”

Grant stands without responding and walks past him into the hall, down the stairs to the landing, out the front door. Jason follows. Standing in the drive they can see the remains of the front bumper. 

“Wow” 

“Yeah”

“...Jesus fuck, man”

“Yeah” 

The front door clicks open, and the soft steps of woven sandals pad towards them. Grant turns to say “hi mom,” Jason balls his hands into fists and sets his jaw. 

Isabella replies with a muzzy “hello, Grant. Jason. Why are you standing in the driveway?”

“Lookin’ at the car,” Grant replies

“I see”

“Jas called me to pick him up and a dog ran into the road. I swerved into a telephone pole”

“I see. Are you alright?”

“Yeah”

“Jason?”

“Yeah”

“Okay. I am not entirely sure if this is a dream that I am having. Goodnight my children, be safe. Please don’t crash my car again”

“Okay mom”

“...G’night...” 

Grant turns to watch her walk back into the house, white robe swishing around her legs, arms crossed about her abdomen. Jason continues staring at the car. She closes the door behind her, and at the click Jason’s shoulders relax.

“...Thanks”

“Yeah. The fuck did you do to the car, man?”

“...”

“Are you drunk?”

“...”

“Did you hit a pole or what?”

“...Barrier. Concrete. On the side of the road”

“...Huh”

“...You gonna yell at me?”

“Tomorrow, probably. Drink some water. Go to sleep. Maybe eat something”

“...Okay. Thank you”

“Yup”

“...You going to sleep now?”

“Yup”

“‘Kay… G’night”

Grant stands silently, unmoving, staring at the street beyond the drive. “Yeah. Goodnight.” He leaves Jason standing in front of the car and heads back to his room; he has to tell Daisy goodnight and go to sleep. Jason feels an intense sickness bloom in his lower ribs and sinks to his haunches in the drive. He doesn’t notice the grease seep into his jeans. 

 

On the dais, it is his left foot which twitches first. His fingers grasp at air next as they fight to coil into fists. His breathing deepens and quickens; he heaves, unconscious, until the oxygen reaches his lungs, and his blood, and heart, and brain. He jolts upright before he is even aware again, eyes remaining closed until he’s sitting hunched over the dragon protruding from his chest. His first sight upon reanimation is red. Tears from the pain cloud his vision and distort detail: he knows he is covered in blood, not whose. He knows he is in unthinkable pain, not why. He grasps at the handle, fumbles, and only succeeds in jolting the blade lodged in his body. The shock is so severe he blacks out and drops, right there. 

The smack of his hands against the stone snaps him back to consciousness, and he manages to keep from cracking the back of his skull open, but just barely. Dizzy and nauseous beyond sapience he nearly vomits. He clutches at the edge of the slab and pulls his body over the side, lands knees first on the rock foundation. He is too dazed to vocalise at this new and sudden pain, merely kneels, motionless, for ages. For aeons. Blood pools around him. He tries to stand, slips. Tries again, faints from exertion. He crawls. He can hear the ocean. He crawls. 

 

He can think again in the pit along the beach. He followed a warren deep below the earth and was rewarded with the devil. He made conference with the devil and was rewarded with clarity. He regrets clarity immediately and the devil promises him a freedom into peace, of mind and body. Of purpose and intention. “Be my body,” says the devil. “Be my hands. Be my hands and I will be your heart and mind,” he promises. He cannot see a way out of the pit. But the devil can, and the devil does. He tries to speak, succeeds at nothing more impressive than a metallic sputtering. “Your lungs are full of blood. Soon you will drown. When you drown I will eat your body for there is no other food,” the devil intones. His hands are too weak to be away from his body, but his knees are too raw to crawl any further. He cannot speak, nor ambulate. He has forgotten the devil can move, and can bound on his haunches near enough to grasp his hand. Electrified, he is reminded of his first bout with cocaine, and feels his mind evacuate his body, even as he watches his own free arm grab a rock. 

 

On a beautiful morning with soft blue skies, dotted with wispy white clouds, Grant turns their mothers car into the drive. The garage door is down on their fathers, but it doesn’t matter, if he has need of a car one is available, and they don’t have to share as long as their mother remains in Italy. Jason turns in the front passenger seat to wake Riley up again while Grant kills the engine. Riley grumbles and so does Jason as they move to gather their overnight bags. Grant is quiet, and stretches, so his brothers line up in height order to copy him. “Hey,” Riley mumbles, “what’s that smell?”  
“Car exhaust,” Grant replies, “just turned the engine off”  
Jason pauses to sniff at the air and turns his head to the garage “I think dad left the car on by accident.”  
Grant stiffens.  
“Stay here. Don’t go inside,” he says, so Jason heads for the door. 

“I SAID don’t fucking go inside! Stay with Riley, stay away from the garage,” Grant barks. When he opens the front door a cloud of exhaust wafts onto the lawn and they balk, beginning to cough. Grant has to hold his jacket over his face before disappearing down the front hall, his shoes pounding up the stairs as he jogs to their parents room echoes out the door. 

“Hey let’s go sit by the curb, okay? Let’s go sit by the curb,” Jason says and takes Riley by the hand. They abandon their things in a pile. From deep within the house Grant calls out “Daaaaad” and Riley stops. Jason keeps walking and grips harder on his wrist. Grant keeps yelling. They reach the curb and sit. Grant runs out of the house at a full sprint, skidding when he turns to face the garage. He crouches to force the door open, and Jason pulls Riley into his shoulder, turning away to cover his face. 

 

When he jolts awake he is first aware of an ungodly ache, and then a hideous smell. He moves his left hand to rub the sleep from his eye, and is caught. His wrist has duct tape wrapped around it anchoring him to a bed frame. His bare chest has fabric tape anchoring a pad of bandages. He stares at both confusedly until he decides he doesn’t want to deal with this, actually, and goes back to sleep. It’s quiet.

When he awakens he’s mostly just thirsty. The radio is playing somewhere near him, softly, for the signal is poor. He tries to lift his head and finds that he is too weak, and must settle for rolling his skull. He is in what looks like a basement: cement walls, cement floor, cement ceiling with a wooden staircase across from him. He stretches his hands and feet digit by digit; the bones crackle like firewood. A gas lamp weakly sputters to his left, with a throw of light so poor the corners of the room descend into pitch. Jason reaches over to the tape on his wrist and tries to peel it off enough to wriggle his hand out, when the shadows reform and move.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

“STOP SCREAMING”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“STOP FUCKING SCREAMING”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- ” gasp.

“OH MY GOD. Oh fuck. Are you done?”

Wheezing turns to choking.

“Hey. Hey! Are you done?!”

Jason brings his hand up to hold his chest in place; jerks it back when he realises how much it hurts. He tries to roll onto his left side to open his airways and realises with a jolt of fear that he can’t. He’s choking and he can’t move. He can’t do anything. 

“Stop panicking,” the shadow says as it moves closer. Jason tries to slap it. “HEY! I SAID STOP IT! CUT THAT SHIT OUT!” The shadow slaps his hand so hard it goes a little numb. “God. What the fuck is wrong with you, man, seriously?” Jason can’t even cough anymore, his hand is lying limp, fingers twitching. “Oh. Oh fuck,” the shadow says before rolling Jason to his side and kneeling in front of his face. Elbows resting on the mattress, the shadow tilts its head to align their faces. The light of the gas lamp likens itself to a halo. “If you choke to death I’m gonna be so fucking mad, Jason”

Jason wheezes and tries to claw at it again. He misses. 

“Wow”

“...Ffffuuuuck ooooffffff…” 

“This is my basement. You fuck off”

Wheeze “youu tiiied mmy fffucking haannd uup”

“Hah. Yeah. Do you want some water?” 

“…Yyeess…” 

Sitting up is awful. The pain in his chest is close to paralysing and he has to take three tablets of codeine. He can only stomach half a bottle of water. “Why am I here?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No”

“Hmm. Sucks!” Vaas inhales his own pile of opiates dry and returns to staring discomfitingly at Jason. The effect is ruined when Jason yawns and Vaas giggles. 

“Is this real?”

“Is anything real, amigo?”

“Fuck you” 

Vaas smiles with his eyes crinkled softly at the corners, a touch of canines, a little huff of laughter. Jason doesn’t notice his hand come up until it’s cracked across his face so hard he might have blacked out for a second. Vaas stands with a huff and pads over to the foot of the bed to yank at his ankles until Jason’s laid out flat again. The pain is blinding and Jason realises he’s drifting in and out of consciousness. Again. This time Vaas sits on the edge of the bed, next to Jason’s hip, leaning over to fill his vision. Vaas’ hands grip his face; his nails dig into the flesh. Jason can smell the staleness and the sourness of his breath; notice the asymmetry to his pupils. There’s sweat at his temples and he trembles very slightly when he speaks, “Jason... Jason are you listening to me...? Do you hear me? Blink twice if you hear me.” Jason obeys, too tired and dazed to defy him even on principle. Vaas nods very slowly as he shuts his eyes, and Jason does too. “I am not… in the mood… right now,” Vaas breathes directly into his face, “for toughguy shit. And I swear, Jason. I swear. I will leave you in this pit to bleed… Give me a reason just. Give me a reason.” And all is quiet. For a moment. 

“Wwhhhyyyy aam III hheeere…?” Jason whispers, too weak for pronounced speech. 

“I brought you here,” Vaas whispers in turn, eyes still closed. “I brought you here. I have plans, hermano. Plans…” 

“Tooo kiiillll mmee...?” 

Vaas smiles and taps their brows together. “Later… Later, Jason I’m going to cut you to little pieces. I’m going to skin you alive, bake that into a jacket…. Stuff your intestines with the meat of you, feed you to the vultures… Later… All later… I got plans…” 

“Whhaat plaanss…?”

Vaas leans back and opens his eyes. Blinking slowly in the light he looks gentle and sleepy. Jason thinks about cracking his forehead into Vaas’ nose so hard it turns into bolognese. He believes that Vaas would kill him. He thinks about how worth it such an undertaking would be, when Vaas seems to come back to his body, tiredness giving way to confusion as he begins to squint at the room around them. His hands relax and he pats Jason’s cheek softly before sliding off the bed to the floor and bounding like an animal back to the corner he came from. There’s a pile of fabric there; blankets on old clothing over a woven mat on the floor. He pulls a sheet out of the pile and returns, draping it over Jason to the neck. Even tucking him in a little around his shoulders and restrained arm. He turns the lamp down even lower until his nest disappears again and slinks back to crawl into it’s blackened maw. Jason is angry that he agrees with the sentiment but allows his fury to cool from a roar to a simmer

.

When Vaas awakens it’s to the sound of liquid dripping. He forces himself up through the grogginess to check for leaks; for flooding. He finds no water, just that Jason is awake too, as a spattering of gore drips onto his face. Single drops, one or two at a time, dripping down from the hole blown open in the trachea of a man lying on the ceiling above them. White man, red shirt, shaved head, gaped mouth. Vaas clears his throat and Jason’s eyes roll in his head like they’re made of glass to land on him. As the blood hits him he flinches slightly, every time; his face blank as a mannequins when he asks, “what?”

Vaas tries to point at the body, “uhh. The uhh… What is like-... happening?”

Jason just blinks at him. “Stuff”

Vaas blinks back, “how long?”

“Twenty-something minutes after you fell asleep”

“Oh.” Vaas tracks one of the drops hit the top of Jason’s cheekbone and slide down just past the curve of his lips, and off his chin, before disappearing into the ether tucked into his neck. They leave no stain on his skin. “So, do you like, know this guy? Like, who is this man?”

Jason does something weird with his face at that, and rolls back over to stare some more daggers into the beast's face instead of answering. Vaas stands slowly and winces as his knees crack, something Jason mimics when Vaas climbs onto the bed and his legs shift for the first time in days. Head nearly level with the body Vaas pokes it in the stomach. And then again. He walks up to stand next to Jason’s shoulder so he can poke it in the jowl; then the eye. It’s a body; just a body. Vaas steps back off the bed and squats by his cloths to scrounge for a rag to tie around the wound and stop the bleeding, and around the head to hide the face. 

“Thanks…” Jason mumbles.

“Mmhmm! You want food?”

“...Yeah”

“Good! Be right back!” Vaas chirps before scrambling up the stairs away from the hate-fuelled undead monster. He moves on four points like an animal. He hopes it’s raining for real outside; he hopes everyones patrols have been upped; that the animals are vicious and the world is unfriendly. That he can be away as long as possible. The whole entire fucking world can go to hell as long as it’s one far away from his. Back inside the basement, Grant begins to saturate the rags. Jason curls onto his left side and tries to sleep. 

In his dreams, he is seventeen again, in that poorly lit mechanics garage his friend of a friends coke dealer worked at, breathing in the overpowering scent of gasoline, and metallics, trying to buy cocaine from a guy who sells cocaine but not to him, apparently. Hazy with frustration he zeroes in on the depraved fantasy of what it would feel like to tear this man to pieces with his teeth. The spurt of blood over his face and hands, gnawing at the muscle lining of his throat, the threaded capillaries. A creature of the pit, he splits his jaw in half like a snake and drives his fangs into the chest cavity to rip the heart in twain. Like a stinking, feral beast. As he blinks the red out of his vision, green blooms around him in patches. His hands don’t feel attached to his body as they reach out, sharp stone in hand, ragged flesh in the wake of his strike to a dog’s skull. And again to still the twitching. 

Loping in a crouch around the corner of wooden huts, a man screams in alarm at finding the dog. He ignores it and ducks into the nearest building while men run to surround the dog, and fan out. He has a few seconds until they reach the building and tucks through their crates, pocketing a pistol, bush machete, lighter, penknife. Slips back out the door and around another corner as someone comes up behind him. There’s a strip of cleared earth at the edges of the encampment connecting to a dry riverbed, now full of tall grass, and then the bush again. 

Clear the packed dirt in two strides, leap the ditch, duck upon reaching the trees as the men come out around the sides of the buildings. He isn’t sure if the yelling behind him is because they saw him or a matter of course. He sprints. And sprints. An ache picks up in his lungs. He sprints. Crashes through the brush, redirects to avoid an old monster of a trunk. Skids. Falters. Rebalances, and jerks his head back to see if anything has followed him. Then the side of his chest hits the branch at full force and he doesn’t see anything at all for a while. 

Jason blinks back into his human body, lungs empty, eyes full of human ear, singular. Grant has apparently decided that he’s done with the ceiling for now. Jason makes a noise like an iceberg scoring open a ships hull. Barely able to lift his elder in their primes, he wonders if the acrid rage saturating the blood pumping sluggishly from his stab wound, is corrosive enough to erode flesh. From the inside, it feels like it should. The corpse remains whole despite best efforts and Jason decides he’d rather die on the concrete floor of this dank, disgusting fucking basement than suffocate under this undead meat. 

When Vaas staggers in, bruised, gore-soaked, spirits crushed, its to the sight of Jason face down on the concrete floor, wrist still strapped to the frame, blanket only half on, for it remains partially pinned beneath the bulk of red shirt white guy. He didn’t react to Vaas’ entrance; he doesn’t react to Vaas poking him between the shoulder blades. He’s cold enough he could be dead. Vaas chops at the duct tape with all the finesse of a drunk zombie and nearly takes Jason’s whole hand off, but he gets the tape and Jason’s somewhere else right now so it’s fine. Vaas sinks onto his knees next to Jason’s head. As Jason’s wrist slaps onto the ground he groans like a creaking cellar door. Vaas groans back like a man would mock a whining dog so Jason tries to swat him. He misses so widely Vaas mistakes it for a muscle spasm, and drops his bag on the floor and crawls on hands and knees into the fabric mound. Jason lies on the floor aching for a while before getting bored, and following Vaas into the pile. 

“Get out of my shit”

“Get the thing off my shit”

“Get the thing off your own shit”

“Shut up”

“You shut up. Fucking… coloniser…”

Jason pats his cheek as kindly as his limited motor control allows, “dude. Quiet time”

Vaas slaps him back but huffs instead of speaking, and pulls cloth over Jason’s back to close up the gaps in the warmth on auto-pilot. Jason is already gone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im not gonna post chapters of this for a while like less than i already do. consider this an indefinite hiatus.
> 
> i have some dyke shit i would rather work on like vaas is fun and the dance jason does as i shoot my pistol at his ankles is serviceable, but women are, and have always been, my actual passion. and considering the fucking Dearth of women-centric content or even like. normal depictions of women as people instead of crazed, villainous objects of lust and decay, bereft of soul, of warmth, oriental temptress, harbinger of sin, upon which either slurs or mass casual disdain is heaped, bothers me. like not to be un Putain de Couleur on main but Jesus Christ
> 
> maybe somebody will miss my homosexuelles but have you considered; that dyke shit? i know i have! anyways stay tuned for Woman Culture, of which i will be this video game fan communitys ambassador


End file.
